Agile Methodology For .NET Development Teams

Manifesto for Agile Development

17+ people gathered in a ski resort and they came up with the Agile manifesto.

Understanding Types of Backlogs

In Agile-scrum there are the following two types of backlogs:

1. Product backlog
2. Sprint backlog

A Product backlog is a larger list of work items (in the Agile world it is known as User Stories), it is like a “Functional Specification Document” or System Requirements Specification Document or “Business Requirement Document” or whatever your organization likes to call it.

So whatever user requirements we have, they are all stored in a Product Backlog, backlog.

Sprint Backlog: A Sprint is defined as the time that teams work to deliver certain items from a product backlog. But before teams start working on those items (User Stories), they need to be properly defined.

Scrum: End -to-End Process

Agile Scrum Ceremonies

A Team works on a sprint for anywhere between 1-4 weeks. An ideal sprint duration is 2 weeks. So from a Product backlog some User Stories are moved to the Sprint Backlog and then the team works on those for 2 weeks. During those two weeks the following ceremonies are done.

Sprint Planning: this is 1^st thing that takes place before any work can begin. In this meeting the team looks at the User Stories that the Product Owner thinks the team should work upon in the next sprint. the Team looks in detail at the given requirements, brainstorms, defines/reviews the acceptance criteria or the work, estimates and assigns the work to team member(s).

Daily Stand-Up: this is the status meeting among team(s) members; in this meeting each team member gives a status on the following three criterias:

1. What I did yesterday.
2. What I will do today.
3. Am I blocked?

Sprint Review: this takes place after each User Story is completed, so the Product owner can accept the work.

Sprint Demo: this provides an opportunity to the entire team and the larger group of users to see all the work the team has completed and to see end-to-end functionality.

Sprint Retrospective: this gives an opportunity to the development team to discuss the following three things:

1. What went well?
2. What went wrong?
3. What we want to improvise?

Agile Estimation

Agile offers the following two types of estimations:

1. Story Points. They are the most commonly used Agile estimation technique.
   
   
   
   
2. T-Shirt Sizing, some teams estimate User Stories in T-Shirt sizing.
   
   

Scrum Status Board

Agile enforces daily status reporting and therefore many teams use various ways to track and show the progress on each user story. I found that a detailed board like the following provides more visibility and tracks each task/activity related to a Sprint Item.

Agile Tools

There are many tools available for Agile-scrum teams, but I have found TFS and rally widely used in the industry. Both work on similar Agile-scrum concepts and are very user-friendly.

The following are the screenshots of TFS.

Sprint View in TFS

Workflow for Task Status

Drag and Drop support for ease.

Conclusion

Though Agile seems very easy to understand and implement, it's very challenging to apply it correctly and many organizations are not in agreement with what Agile brings and its way of delivering things. Startups are usually known to follow Agile rather well-established companies at the organization level. In other words, in a company a team might be doing Agile but various other teams or company's mindset might still be waterfall based. But Agile is an amazing methodology to deliver more value, regardless of whether you are working in an Agile team or not it's worth knowing about the Agile-scrum process.